Child's Play Review (2019) Worth Watching?

It’s about a kid who gets a rogue AI doll as a gift, likes it at first, then really, really grows to hate it.

Child's Play 2019 was directed by Lars Klevberg (who also directed Polaroid) and stars Gabriel Bateman (from Lights Out) and Aubrey Plaza (from Life After Beth).

More than a toy... He's your new best friend.

Child's Play is the 8th film in the Chucky franchise and a re-imagining of the original Child's Play from '88 . The franchise, as most everyone knows, is about a serial killer named Charles Lee Ray (aka "Chucky") who uses black magic to possess a popular 'Good Guy' doll as a means of escaping death. The point of every Child's Play movie was two-fold. It was about a serial killing doll and the serial killer's soul trying to get out and regain human form.

This Child's Play has nothing to do with any of the other Child's Plays. It's a stand-alone movie completely independent from the franchise. The movie happens to share the name and happens to have a similar looking doll, but that's where the resemblance ends.

There's no serial killer, no black magic and none of the character dynamics that gave the other five movies their dark vibe (the other two, Bride and Seed, were just goofy). This Child's Play didn't "feel" like a Child's Play movie at all. It felt more like Stranger Things, It (2017) or Summer of '84 . It's a movie about a group of kids running around having to save the day. You could even throw in movies like The Goonies, Earth to Echo and Stand by Me (if they had a ton of F-bombs and wild gore). It was even like these other kid-save-the-day movies in that it was strangely light-hearted, there were even sad parts. Very unexpected.

One thing Chucky's always been known for is funny one-liners.

Chucky had NO funny one-liners.

There was some comic relief, but it came from the other characters and in tired ways, same style of comic relief you see in action movies.

Overall the vibe was just off for a Child's Play movie. Even the details they used to connect it to the franchise seemed forced. It was Andy's birthday, but it wasn't really. Andy's mom was a single mom, but it served no real purpose in the story (Andy didn't need babysitters and his mom did nothing to help). The doll decided its own name would be Chucky, for no apparent reason. And there were no clear nods to the original, it almost seemed as if they went out of their way to avoid it.

The one redeeming factor I will give it is the gore. The gore was fantastic! There were a couple of creative kills, one funny kill and buckets of blood. The only thing I'll remember about this movie a year from now are two particular kill scenes. I won't spoil them, but they really jump off the screen.

Worth Watching?

Meh, I don't think so. As a big fan of Chucky I was seriously disappointed. I expected this to be different from the others, but I didn't expect it to be a completely different movie that just leased the naming rights.